The beauty of the internet is such that every opinion has become worthless; this goes doubly so for those with publish buttons on (relatively, we're humble) major websites. For every opinion, there's a matching counter-opinion, and that's great. Yesterday, we linked to an article by Mark Pilgrim about tinkerers and the iPad, and of course, someone was bound to disagree with that one.

I just want my iPhone (have one) to work. Just as having to put up with unstable OS's at work drives me nuts I don't want those problems with my iPad when it arrives. I want it to work.

It won't work (at least it won't work for web video). Because of Apple's lockdown, iPad has no Flash, and no support for freedom codecs (e.g. Theora, Vorbis, FLAC or Dirac). AFAIK the only support for web video would be via HTML5/h264, and the only places that have that are experimental sites for Vimeo and YouTube.

I don't want to have try and fiddle around on the command line to fix Xfree86 because some app has changed my setting and now the GUI is non functional and certainly don't want to have to tinker and fiddle my way to acceptable performance.

FUD.

When I pay money for something I expect it to work straight out of the box.

If you pay for it to work out of the box, it will (generally) work out of the box ... regardless if it is OSX, Windows 7 or Kubuntu in your box. Not so, apparently, if it is an iPad.

Because I have more important things to do with my time than customise the spinning ball, change the background or overclock the CPU.

Because you don't want to do those things is not a valid reason for a company to provide no means for anyone who wants to to do them.

"Because you don't want to do those things is not a valid reason for a company to provide no means for anyone who wants to to do them.

Sure it is if the company is targeting "me" and not "them". "

This is a possible argument if the company left it at that ... but they don't.

They have already used the argument along the lines "but popular devices (read their devices, e.g. iPod) support only such-and-such a format, and not that other open one, so we can't use that open format on the public access web".

They aren't targetting their control-freak restrictions at just you, they are targetting these anti-freedom restrictions at everybody on the planet.

They are even targetting web content providers, via the ploy: "if you use Flash or HTML5/Theora, you won't get iPad users, so use HTML5/h264 instead (and BTW pay us a royalty, but not Adobe)".

Strangely enough, not everybody on the planet is willing to be restricted by what Apple wants them limited to be able to do.